Re: Mobile users trailing behind web surfers?

Re: Not so fast..

Given the likely signal strengths involved, it's probably that your AP will start interfering with your phone rather than the other way around.

Entirely unrelated, I once fell for the allure of wireless, bought myself a fancy logitech 2.4 GHz gaming mouse and a fancy logitech 5.1 surround sound system with 2.4GHz wireless rear speakers. Both work great, but if you listen to music whilst using the mouse, every other packet the mouse sends seems to be dropped, which makes for an "interesting" gaming experience.

Re: Collateral Damage from all this.

Farmer's markets are good, but you have to live close to the source. Imagine being in, say a London or New York city and trying to find a farmer's market.

I grew up in East Anglian countryside, on a farm, surrounded by farms and farm shops.

Its 50x easier to find a farmers market in London than it is in the countryside, because "farmers" (traders) like to come to areas where there are lots of people, and not lots of farms - its good for the margin.

There are traditional, established markets like Peckham, Walthamstow and South Ken, but there are also irregular artisanal farm traders setting up shop all over the place, eg in Stratford shopping centre on a Sunday, the regular market is replaced by "french"* farmers.

Re: More neutral language please

On the right track, Zog. 'Discount' implies a reduction of some kind, but Aldi, Lidl don't discount on previously higher prices, they're just cheaper than the others.

In FMCG terms however, it means they purchase goods to sell from the discounter channel. Aldi and Lidl have low prices by buying things that are cheap when they are cheap and selling them cheap. This means that everything in there is cheap, but if you go back every 3 weeks, it won't have the same range of stuff in them.

Tesco/Sainsburys/Morrison tend to keep the same products in stock most of the year, baring seasonal line items.

Re: Are AMD and nVidia on board?

I'm deadly serious about the DirectX API being an open standard. Lots of Microsoft technologies are open standards. Why not this API?

First, take DirectX.

MS has always used DirectX in two ways, as a marketing tool to sell OS licenses (Want DX10? You have to buy Vista, not available on XP, Want DX11? You have to buy 7, not included in Vista), and as a way to lock games makers in to Windows and Xbox. Lock in does not work with an open standard.

Secondly, OpenGL already exists. OpenGL is a real open standard; the development of the standard happens in an open environment where any member of the Khronos group can contribute. Anyone wanting to use a standard graphical library on multiple platforms will use OpenGL.

Re: hmm

Sympathetic - to a point

The cited case is of a "hi tech firm"* in the most connected part of the country, doing things with digital media, who decided "Wow, this place is awesome to set up our business, it's cheap, there's a trendy barrista on the corner and we're only yards away from the Spread Eagle!"

They didn't take in to account highly available network connectivity, or they would have chosen somewhere where they could get cheap connectivity.

Another option, if you make your money in digital media, is to, y'know, fucking pay for a leased line like the rest of us. Available throughout London for less than a monkey a month, probably less than they spend on coffee.

Of course nobody wants to be in an identity parade in case they get wrongly fingered for a crime. But if the police have a photo of somebody they want to interview, and there's no match in the PND, I don't see any technical reason why they couldn't run their face recognition technology against facebook.

Re: Thinking about uninstalling flash for good

It makes you wonder what they are doing with all the money that they forcibly extract from the viewers.

The BBC is vastly underfunded for what we ask it to do. All of their awesome tech is delivered on a shoestring budget by people who should really be working elsewhere and making a whole lot more money. I don't like that they spend so much money on slebs and dancing shows, but it seems to be what people want to watch.

PS: Why does their OCSP list got out of date information? Probably because the person who is fixing that is fixing something more important at the minute. Particularly given that OCSP is a dog, doesn't serve its purpose (particularly in this scenario, no client certificates to revoke, so OCSP is controlling revoking the server certificate) and most browsers will silently ignore invalid OCSP information, I'd imagine its fairly low down the list.

Re: Something new every day

Its real world failure numbers for a specific type of load.

If your real world load is not the same as theirs, I'm not sure you can tell too much from this.

Personally, I think their entire premise is bogus - "How many disks do you need to plug in to a server so you can just leave it for 4 years?" is not a question that needs answering because the opex of providing someone to support your boxes is dwarfed by specifying an array of that size (in terms of extra initial cost, extra PDU, extra rack space).

They haven't even eliminated the person to maintain the server - every server needs an admin or two, even if you don't have to go put disks in it occasionally.

Re: Static IPs

All of this to satisfy the 0.01% of technically savvy El Reg reading (or writing) customer base. Really?

Nope, not to satisfy that - although it is a wonderful side effect. The main benefit is that you no longer rely on DHCP servers for your users to get service, and therefore your users never have no internet because of an overloaded or poorly configured DHCP server.

Be used to have innumerable issues with their DHCP servers; as a static IP customer paying £2 extra a month these never affected me.

Removing components that can fail provides a better service, and is a good thing.

Re: Answer me this...

If BT (wholesale) can rent my line to CheapFoneCo for £8.95 a month, which I then rent from CheapFoneCo for £10 a month or whatever, why the hell can't I just rent my line from BT (retail) for £8.95?

Because BT Wholesale are not allowed to offer services cheaper to BT Retail than they do to other providers. If BT Retail only charged you £8.95, their would have to be purchasing it at a lower price than £8.95 to account for costs.

Just because a kernel is modular does not mean it is not monolithic. Linux is a modular kernel, but it is also a monolithic kernel. You can load a driver for your TV tuner, but it is loaded in to kernel space - ergo, monolithic.

NT is a modular kernel, but it is not a monolithic kernel (its a hybrid, like OS X).

It gets blurred a bit in Linux, where things like the sound system are partially user-mode daemons if you use a sound daemon like esd or pulseaudio. However, the sound daemon will use kernel mode drivers (ALSA) to communicate with the sound hardware; a true microkernel would provide a mechanism for communicating with (almost) any device, with the device specific bits happening in user mode and not kernel mode.

To go back to the TV tuner example, Linux provides a whole raft of TV tuner drivers. They all run in kernel space. BSD doesn't provide any TV tuner drivers, but provides a kernel mode character driver that can be used to communicate with USB devices. The Linux drivers are then run entirely in user space, communicating using this simple kernel driver. Performance + inability for a TV card to oops your system.

Re: Green for O'Reilly

Way back, I quickly learnt to avoid buying O'Reilly.

I found that, too often, their books were full of irrelevant padding.

Without words..

How do you know anything if you don't read O'Reilly?

Sure, there are some duds (I'd avoid "UML in a nutshell"), but in general they are just awesome - and in some cases, irreplaceable. If you did apache module programming with apache 1.3, and you didn't have O'Reilly's "Writing Apache Modules With Perl and C", then you were missing the only documentation of APR that existed for 1.3.

Compared to other publishers, O'Reilly are a by-word for quality. I remember one "book" from Packt that consisted 1/3rd poorly written project diary and 2/3rd (mostly machine generated) Java. It did not teach me XSLT.

Re: Bullshit

I wouldn't take "The Bible", but perhaps just one edition of it - the King James Bible ("the most influential version of the most influential book in the world, in what is now its most influential language").

More commonly used idioms were penned by the translators of KJ, notably Tyndale, than any other English author, including Shakespeare, eg "feet of clay", "reap the whirlwind", "filthy lucre", "take root", "the powers that be", "the blind leading the blind", "no rest for the wicked" and apparently 250 more.

Re: So-

Dwarf planets are not planets. Planets are objects massive enough to be shaped by gravity (tick), not undergoing nuclear fusion (tick), cleared out all the space around the object of smaller objects (fail).

It's like saying "If Bob is a gorilla, and Bill is a gorilla, how many humans in this room?!"

Re: Accused or convicted?

Nor for this lady there isn't. Must be devastating to have a child murdered, but I'm not at all sure what she wanted the police to do, or indeed what they could do, to someone who has not been found guilty of anything.

Re: Sweet...

There is definitely something wrong with the interconnect between Virgin and Sky.

I get on average 1mb/s (often lower) downloading movies from Sky while a Steam game will come in at 12mb/s

There are so many reasons for getting a slow speed from a particular provider, it is much more likely to be congestion within Sky's network or capacity of their links rather than the connection between Sky and Virgin.

I'm on synchronous gigabit FTTP (Hyperoptic) in Central London, and can only download from Sky at around 8Mbit/s (1MB/s), whilst Steam and other well connected provider's downloads come down at between 400-700Mbit/s (50-80MB/s).

Re: The origin of patch Tuesday

Re: No.

Works for me in principle - until it collides with UK political reality, when...

So we can't have nice things, paid for in a sensible way, because in the past we haven't managed to do it? We might as well stick with our current system and just continue to fade in to insignificance, because cynicism?

Re: No.

Naive backwards thinking. The answer should be "YES. A THOUSAND TIMES YES", however it has not been phrased properly.

We should absolutely sell off our bandwidth. It absolutely makes sense to use mobile communication frequencies best suited to communicating with mobiles.

It makes absolutely no sense to deliver IPTV via wireless. If you are in a static location, it also makes no sense to use wireless infrastructure for a permanent connection.

Spectrum is valuable stuff. We absolutely should sell our spectrum to whomever will pay the most for it, and use the proceeds to provide a real public communications backbone in the UK. FTTH is what is required, not in towns but everywhere. The 3G auction produced enough money to pay for every home in the UK to be lit.

So, 1) Sell bandwidth, 2) fibre up the country with the money, 3) allow operators to use their newly freed up bandwidth.

In one step, we've paid for the modernization of our internet infrastructure in a way that no other country in the world could match, we've maximised the usage of our spectrum to allow our communications to be more ubiquitous and by making FTTH universally available, we're not limiting the access to information to the rich.

Re: Not exactly killing

Kim Jong Il was a huge hollywood film fan (over 20,000 DVDs) and, despite being a ruthless dictator crushing his own people, apparently had a sense of humour. He probably enjoyed parts of Team America, given it lampooned America almost as much as the Norks.